Thursday, April 12, 2012

Azawad: Tropical Paradise

Certain ill-intentioned parties have launched a whispering campaign against newly freely popularly independently Islamic Peoples AZAWAD (the independently freedom-loving nation previously known as Sucky Northern Mali), insinuating that we are religious extremists, perhaps even a bit bigoted. Nothing could be further from the truth!

A typical resort in Azawad (artist's conception)

True, we are a Salafi-Islamist Afro-Takfiri People’s Republican pre-Caliphal Emirate, with our own special brand of Shari`ah law. You steal, we cut off your hand; you look sidewise at our women, we cut off something else. But we are free and open to jihadis of all faiths. And to make good on our promises, we are specifically inviting the Lord’s Resistance Army -- which, according to your own Rush Limbaugh, is an upstanding Christian force -- to join our swarthy brethren from Peoples Free-Enterprise Nigeria and set up shop in beautiful people’s Azawad. And in case Mr Limbaugh should ever feel the need to flee his native land (in the event, for example, of the failure of the People’s Fascist Coalition, and a reaction by enraged Moderates), he will be welcomed in free and popular Azawad with open arms, and offered the post of Minister of Disinformation.

Under the leadership of popular people’s Presidential-timber Prime Minister Abu-Willard ibn-Iblis “al-Mitt” dhu-al-Wajhayn “the axe” al-Romni, Azawad has established an impressive track-record of welcoming people of all faiths, including some of the most bizarre.

His Holiness Lord Yusef ag Iblis al-Kony, noted LRA warlord and messiah, has graciously accepted the post of Lord High Minister of Messianic Affairs for the free and independent people’s popular emirate of Afro-Islamist Azawad. His ascension will be celebrated, as usual, with human sacrifice.

Meanwhile ho ho ho, clueless Americans continue to hunt for him in jungles where he is not to be found!

[This was the featured page-one article in the print edition of today’s Washington Post:

“Six months after President Obama ordered 100 elite troops to help capture the messianic warlord Joseph Kony, U.S. military commanders said Sunday that they have been unable to pick up his trail but believe he is hiding in this country’s dense jungle, relying on Stone Age tactics to dodge his pursuers’ high-tech surveillance tools.” ]

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David Justice studied French at the Sorbonne, mathematics and physics at Harvard and MIT, and math and linguistics at Berkeley.He is the author of The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages; and of the fictional worksI Don’t Do Divorce Cases (which includes stories originally published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine) and Murphy on the Mount. He taught French at Berkeley, and linguistics at the University of Alberta, then worked at Merriam-Webster as Editor of Etymology (where he edited Webster’s Book of Word Histories) and as Editor of Pronunciation.He subsequently was editor-in-chief at Franklin Electronic Publishers.He is currently employed as a language analyst, and consultant for the University of Maryland. He lives with his bride of forty years, overlooking a peaceful lake.